The Church

[eniktin]

it's hard to find women with good attitudes, so here is the solution: train them. i am working on a new religious creed, and would appreciate criticism. Please validate your arguments and be constructive. all suggestions will be considered.
-what you think should be taken out?
-what should be rephrased?
-what should be added?

happy new *****cat!

the prophet

THE CREED OF THE CHURCH OF SOCIONICS
If you are not a clown -- you are a fool.
Prophet Lev of the Church of Socionics

I. INTRODUCTION:
-The Church Of Socionics is a church of clowns. A clown is an archetype of a man who does his own thinking, and does not follow the herd to their demise. Thus everybody has a choice to remain a fool, or to become a clown.
-From innocence to wisdom-five representations of God:
The Buddhists painted Him as an inert amalgam of opposites that have neutralized one another. Metaphorically: baby Cupid is holding the bow still; he is paralyzed by his uncertainty about what he must do in order to shoot the arrow. The Jews represented God as an unstable mixture between a macho boy and a wimp. Having gained some confidence, Baby Cupid is desperately alternating between pushing and pulling, to figure out how to trigger the device. Than came the Christians and made Him into a wimp: Cupid is pulling the string towards his ear only, which makes for a weak shot. The Moslems fashioned Him as a macho boy: Cupid jerking the bow forward, but not pulling the string, which makes for a weak shot. Finally enter the gentleman God-the opposites acting in symbiosis; Cupid pulls and pushes at the same time to shoot the bow.

II. DECLARATION OF FAITH:
I believe that Cupid The Gamemaker is the supreme diety, that Clowns and Jesters are his favorites, and that Mr. Lev Kamensky is his prophet.

III. GENESIS:
Cupid The Gamemaker has moulded the Universe into the Grand Game and is perpetually refining and improving it. He has first created two and twenty indestructible spirits out of the winds (ten female spirits and twelve male spirits) and set the loose to compete over the minds of all sentient beings. Eleven spirits were made to speed up progress and eleven to slow it down. Eleven to make people more effective and eleven to make them less effective. To make The Grand Game more challenging, he gave both groups equal power of seduction.

IV. THE NAMES OF THE TWO AND TWENTY INDESTRUCTIBLE SPIRITS:
Female Spirits:
The Dishonest
The Betrayer
The Untrustworthy
The Taker
The Structured
The Honest
The Loyal
The Trustworthy
The Giver
The Flexible

Male Spirits:
The Unruly
The Undisciplined
The Impatient
The Wavering
The Spineless
The Predictable
The Self-Controlled
The Disciplined
The Patient
The Confident
The Self-Worthy
The Challenging

V THE INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH OF SOCIONICS:
-Checkered floor.
-The statue of Cupid The Gamemaker (with Psyche seated at his feet) stands behind the pulpit.
-The two and twenty indestructible spirits are lined up along the side walls either painted, sculpted, or in stainglass. The eleven progressive spirits -- along the right wall, the eleven regressive spirits -- along the left. The "Spirits Of the Right" are slender and graceful. The "Spirits Of the Left" have a more vain, decadent appearance, the females have broader shoulders, one can notice that their gestures are somewhat unnatural and studied.
-Illuminated copies of Doc Love's "The System", pamphlets with "The Creed", and another volume dealing with psychological types and intertype relations are distributed throughout the isles.

VI. A COMMON CREED IS NECESSARY TO FREEDOM:

-A quote from Chesterton: “A fixed creed is absolutely indispensable to freedom. For while men are and should be various, there must be some communication between them if they are to get any pleasure out of their variety. And an intellectual formula is the only thing that can create a communication that does not depend on mere blood, class, or capricious sympathy.
If we all stark with the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our different visions of them. The strong-eyed man can boast that he sees the sun as a perfect circle. The shortsighted man may say (or if he is an impressionist, boast) that he sees the moon as a silver blur. The colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to live under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that there is nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle (like a monocle) in the other man's, then neither is free, for each is shut up in the cell of a separate universe. [Hedonistic Rule#1: to enjoy comparing differences between two objects, we must be able to use a common scale of measurement for them]
-“It is not merely true that a creed unites men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men - so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chivalrous Crusader must have been nearer to each other, because they were both dogmatists, than any two agnostics. "I say God is One," and "I say God is One but also Three," that is the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly friendship.”

VII. A COMMON CREED IS NECESSARY TO SUCCESSFUL DUALITY:

-Chesterton speaks: “There was hugely more sense in the old people who said that a wife and husband ought to have the same religion than there is in all the contemporary gushing about sister souls and kindred spirits and auras of identical colour. As a matter of fact, the more the sexes are in violent contrast the less likely they are to be in violent collision. The more incompatible their tempers are the better. Obviously a wife's soul cannot possibly be a sister soul. It is very seldom so much as a first cousin. There are very few marriages of identical taste and temperament; they are generally unhappy. But to have the same fundamental theory, to think the same thing a virtue, whether you practise or neglect it, to think the same thing a sin, whether you punish or pardon or laugh at it, in the last extremity to call the same thing duty and the same thing disgrace-this really is necessary to a tolerably happy marriage; and it is much better represented by a common religion than it is by affinities and auras.”

VIII. REAL PEOPLE ARE HONEST:

-Deceit is a sign of weakness. People lie because the feel that they can’t succeed by telling the truth. An archangel did not appear to Mohammed and did not inscribe the Holy Koran in letters of fire; God did not hand Moses a pair of stone tablets, upon which the Ten Commandments were chiseled. In fact their visions came from their own hearts and minds, but they felt, perhaps rightly so for their dark times, that the only way to succeed was to capture the imagination of the people with these “white lies”. But there were other men among us no less prophets, but maybe more. They never got the same credit, but perhaps they did more for the happiness of humanity, than the official prophets. And I said to myself, why can’t they be considered as prophets? Am I not a prophet if I credit myself with the gift of intropersonal intelligence, and not claim visions of angels?
-Following the example of Epictetus, I speak of a Real Person, as God has revealed him to me through his gifts of feeling and intuition.
-I saw “The Truth” in most of what Doc Love (Thomas Hodges) has written, and in much of what Epictetus has written, and some of what Chesterton has written, and I saw it in Charles ****ens’s Child’s History of England, and I saw some truth in Judith Martin (Miss Manners’) philosophy of etiquette, and a little of it in what Socionists and other scholars of personality types and temperaments have produced. But I also saw it in the Shinto religion, Tantric Buddhism, and Epicureanism. And I felt the truth deep inside my heart, where I’ve distilled all these ideas. I saw that only a secular, life-affirming religion like Shinto could bring happiness to the world. For at the root of all our actions is what we believe to be good.
-Honest does not mean open.

 

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IX. REAL PEOPLE DO NOT TAKE REALITY PERSONALLY:

-Things are the way they are. People are the way they are because of their social conditioning. They can’t know better than they know. That is the way the pieces in the game of life and love are setup. If you take reality personally, you end up in pain.
-Question: "I especially despise fallacies of logic or use of rhetoric to misrepresent, mislead or take advantage of people":
Have you not lied to yourself before? Do you hate yourself for it? No. So why hate someone else for doing the same thing? People are conditioned to deceive, to say irresponsible things, to say with certainty things they are inwardly unsure of, to tell half-truths and full lies. Everybody wants to be an authority, but nobody wants to be a true scientist. Some people think deceiving people is plain good-natured fun. That's the way the game is set up. You don't have to be like most people if you know better, but neither should you despise them for being the only thing they know how to be. They could be different if they would have been better taught, or if their life wasn’t so difficult. But those who made their life difficult can’t be blamed either, nor those who made the life of those who made their life difficult, difficult. Nor should you beat yourself up, for not knowing better before than you did. In the future use your brain to think, don’t use it to be brainwashed.

X. REAL PEOPLE DO NOT DEFY REALITY:

-Quoting Doc Love: “Let's say that you decided one day that there is no Gravity, so you jump off the Empire State Building. While in the air, you can believe what you want, but when you hit the pavement, you will realize that you went against reality, resulting in extreme bodily pain”.
-Pain is God’s way of telling you, you are doing something wrong.
-Men, who constantly experience the pangs of rejection, propose marriage on the first date over and over and over again.

XI. REAL PEOPLE LOVE THE TRUTH:

-Doc Love’s (Thomas Hodges) “The System” is the Truth.
-To be successful in love, you must move with reality.

XII. REAL PEOPLE ARE SANE WHICH MEANS FLEXIBLE:

-The definition of insanity is doing the same thing you have always done and expecting different results. Real people are willing to step out of their comfort zone, to try something new, to see if it works.

XIII. REAL PEOPLE QUESTION WHAT THEY HEAR OR READ:

-Real people do not take literature seriously. God gave you a brain to think, not to be brainwashed.

XIV. REAL PEOPLE MOVE WITH REALITY BUT BELIEVE THAT THE HEART OF THE WORLD IS GOOD:

-Paraphrasing Chesterton: People, who think that death is stronger than life, have weariness in their very heart. Being too practical to be moral, they deny what every practical soldier calls-the moral of an army. That’s why Carthaginians who had worshipped money, brute force, and gods with the heads of beasts lost to the Romans.
-Samsara (or the physical universe) is God's body, while Nirvana (or the ideal universe) is God's spirit. It's impossible to love one without loving the other, just like a woman can't love a man she is not physically attracted to for his attitude, or stay in love with a man she is physically attracted to if his attitude turns her off. Like the archetypal gentleman God is really tough and strong on the outside, yet sensitive and soulful on the inside. Thus in man we must revere both the animal and the spirit.

XV. REAL PEOPLE PUT THEIR PRACTICALITY IN THEIR PRACTICE AND THEIR IDEALISM IN THEIR AIMS:

-Vigorous organisms have the luxury of not having to think of their inner processes, but of their external aims. When you kick a ball, you don’t think of which muscle you’ll have to contract, rather you think of the target. A truly practical person has an idealistic streak. And what is Idealism really? It is simply considering everything in its practical application. The purpose of the foot is to kick the ball. The ideal is worldly love as well as love for truth.

 

[eniktin]

XVI. WHAT SHOULD LOVE BE LIKE?

-Love should be a light and easy game between self-sufficient, strong people. It’s purpose-to garnish one’s life, not to cure one of all one’s problems.
-It is bad to use one’s romantic life to find money, status, reflected fame, or any other selfish purpose. Real people pull their own weight.
-Love is valuable for its own sake.
-Only a relationship between equals gives pleasure. If one dominates the other, than the first remains lonely, isolated in his own world, while the second doesn’t feel important.
-Romantic love is conditional.

XVII. THINGS THAT ARE FORBIDDEN TO LOVERS:

(This article should be posted above the pulpit of the Church of Socionics)

-Don’t break your word
-Don’t try to change the rules of the relationship after you are bound to each other.
-Don’t try to change your partner by nagging
-Don’t rent your love or your body
-Don’t mislead
-Don’t take advantage of innocence
-Don’t fake romantic feelings to keep someone you don’t love.
-Don’t stay in a relationship or marriage with someone you don’t love
-Don’t commit cuckoldry
-Don’t stay in a relationship with someone you don’t trust.

XVIII. RESPECT, FREEDOM, LOYALTY:

If one of these is missing, you are not a real person: real people are divine, human, and democratic.

RESPECT:
-Respect is what makes us democratic.
-In a democratic society, people have to show respect for all people, and likewise demand respect for themselves. Etiquette is a great equalizer, because it’s blind to the distinctions of status, appearance, or age. The mannered person is truly democratic, because he is equally polite with a model, and an old woman; with an investor and a beggar; with people that he needs, and people that he doesn’t need.
-Graciousness and manners are the glue of society.
-It is disrespectful to pretend you have the divine right to try to change people. People are the way they are, what we see is what we get. If you don’t like something about the person-find someone else, with different qualities. If you think this is the best you can find, than you’ll have to be patient with that person’s perceived flaws.
-It is disrespectful to compare your partner with other men or women when you are out together; to discuss your former partners; to make steps towards establishing a relationship with another person, while in the presence of your partner, such as taking someone else’s phone number.
-It is disrespectful to scream at your partner; put him or her down; to give orders; to nag, which means asking for something more than twice or thrice.

FREEDOM:
-Freedom is what makes us divine.
-Chesterton on freedom: “Generally, the moral substance of liberty is this: that man is not meant merely to receive good laws, good food, or good conditions, like a tree in a garden, but is meant to take a certain princely pleasure in selecting and shaping like the gardener. Perhaps that is the meaning of the trade of Adam. And the best popular words for rendering the real idea of
liberty are those which speak of man as a creator.

We use the word "make" about most of the things in which freedom is essential, as a country walk or a friendship or a love affair. When a man "makes his way" through a wood he has really created, he has built a road, like the Romans. When a man "makes a friend," he makes a man. And in the third case we talk of a man "making love," as if he were (as, indeed, he is) creating new masses and colours of that flaming material an awful form of manufacture. In its primary spiritual sense, liberty is the god in man, or, if you like the word, the artist”.
-A person can’t belong to another person. Slavery is universally considered unethical, and it is no less unethical as regards men and women.
-Jealousy is totally natural, but expressing jealousy or possessive demands is bad.
-To be happy we must feel free. I think both partners should have the right to see other people.
-Women are by nature monogamous, men are not. When a woman feels very comfortable with a man, she doesn’t feel the need to see other men. The man can distance himself from her, if she continues to see other men, because that may mean she is losing interest in him. The other reason for her behavior may be jealousy. In any case, the man can’t forbid her to see someone else. We can’t control others, we can only control our own behavior to have an effect on their feelings. Women respond to challenge, which is playing hard to get. Men respond to sweetness and giving.

LOYALTY:
-Loyalty is what makes us human.
-loyalty is the most important thing in a relationship.
-loyalty means, you put the interests of the one who has the most time in with you first, even if you like the newcomer more.
-loyalty means you stay with your partner when the chips are down.
-loyalty means giving your partner moral as well as material support, being on their side.

XIX. REAL PEOPLE ARE TRUSTWORTHY AND EXEMPLIFY SELF-CONTROL:

-Some people believe they can base their trust on the other person having long legs or washboard abs; others in addition to that, need to see the person repeatedly prove to be trustworthy in action. Which one of these is a real person? And most men have no self-control when it comes to women. The paradoxical thing about women is that while they feel happiest when doing the chasing, they fall in love slower. Women are more rational than men in the sphere of relationships; they see love as a game of negotiation. To enjoy their love, and not just the projection of his own feelings a man has to outwait her.

XX. REAL PEOPLE HAVE A BACKBONE:

-In a way we all condition one another by our reactions to each other’s actions. When we let people talk down to us, order us around, insult our intelligence, be rude to us, break their promises, and get away with it-we are saying with our inaction that it is acceptable behavior to be arrogant, bossy, condescending, rude, or disrespectful.
-We also train one another by setting an example with our own behavior. It is wrong to respond to rudeness with rudeness. By doing so, we are not punishing the other person, but conversely justifying what they did in their own eyes, by showing ourselves to be just the same or worse. The legitimate tools to express dissatisfaction are facetiousness, funny skits, questioning, and other similar devices.
-Real people don’t lead people on by saying yes, to avoid the unpleasant task of turning someone down.
-If you believe that 2 and 2 make 4, you say so! Remember what happened to Adam.

XXI. REGRET AND CONFESSION:

-Regret is a divine gift the purpose of which is to help us change.
-We have free will, but it is limited. Metaphorically, free will is like incessant drops of water slowly grinding away at the stone of our habits, temperament, upbringing, and level of awareness. Change takes a long time to take place. Here is the paradox: in order to change we must never feel guilty, never beat ourselves up for our mistakes, but we should regret them.
-Confess your regrets only to a minister who has take a vow of silence. That should take some of the pressure off your chest. Since we can’t go back and undue our mistakes, when you confess to a minister, it takes the weight off of your chest, it makes you feel that you at least did something to show that you don’t like what you did.
-Not the Christians, but the Epicureans first introduced confession.

 

[eniktin]

XXII. A CREED IS A COLLECTIVE TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTION:

-The Self is made up of opposite or contrasting psychological functions. They can be in conflict, or they can artfully be made to work in symbiosis. Groups of people are forced to use division of labor to compete with one another, which exploits the natural tendency of people to develop these functions unevenly. The members of the group are encouraged to develop their strongest function at the price of neglecting or suppressing the weaker ones (which become unconscious). Thus each person performs the task he is best suited for, and the group can work more efficiently. The group benefits at the expense of the individual, because in his private life the individual still needs all his functions to succeed, for example succeed with women (for love is a jungle, there is no division of labor in love, just like a specialist can’t survive in a wild jungle, he can’t survive in love) as well as enjoy life. But since the group exists not for its own sake, but to protect and provide for its members, there is an ideal balance between differentiation of the Ego and individuation, which suits their communal as well as personal interests. It is in the nature of the Unconscious to take up the cause of the suppressed functions and obstruct one’s conscious activities until these are at least partially reassimilated.
-The Ego-Consciousness initially “lights up” the socially useful functions. Than in the process of Individuation it assimilates the other ones. This means becoming who you “really” are-developing a unique individuality: all your natural resources are integrated under the umbrella of a composite transcendental function. Individuation is one’s spiritual birth.
-The suppression of some functions does not contradict being who you “really” are. Being who you “really” are means at least ceasing to identify yourself with your Ego-Consciousness; at least respecting the unconscious and learning to give-and-take, with the Super-Ego acting as an arbiter.
-The dominant function is only the observable tip of an iceberg of the human psyche. But a person's individuality is related more to his transcendental function. Transcendental means cutting across divisions. All creeds are collective transcendental functions, that provide general guidelines for forming a personal one, and can speed up the process. Doc Love’s “The System” is the most effective one. Although “The System” is designed to help men succeed with women, it spills over into other spheres where one has to act as a freelancer, such as business, because it helps one become an omnifunctional savage wildman.
-The transcendental function, which is rooted in the unconscious, is future focused and synthetic. The products of the unconscious (such as dreams) are therefore constructive and creative, rather than reductive.
-If you feel sudden fatigue, it could be a symbolic message from your unconscious that there is more to the situation, than you should keep looking for a better solution. The unconscious is not an obstacle to progress-conversely it is what propels you forward.
-Neurosis causes you to feel unsatisfied, pushes you to keep creating and looking for new solutions. Fear prods you to increase your product knowledge of life. If you consciously make an effort to keep steadily and continuously creating and learning, as you are meant to do-than these functions should have no reason to disturb you. If you overfocus they will return to remind you, that learning and creating is a marathon, not a hundred yard dash. You can never master all the knowledge, or invent a timeless methodology, and than switch your attention to other spheres of life. You should pursue all of them in parallel.
-Maria Von-Franz, Jung’s student stated in one of her lectures that true Individuation starts to take place when one begins to assimilate his “Suggestive” function-which is the total opposite of the “Program” or dominant function. According to research done in America people usually develop this function from age 35 to age 50. This may explain Gulenko’s observation that more mature established people tend to behave like their “Semi-Duals”, since the “Semi-Dual” shares the same center of the brain but uses the opposite function as his dominant.
-The key is that Individuation is the antithesis of pedantism. To successfully apply “The System” one has to be passive when appropriate, aggressive when appropriate; focused and attentive when appropriate and playful and loose when appropriate; sensitive at the right time and insensitive at the right time; follow ones hunches, but verify them by looking for confirming data like a detective; you can’t be in poor physical shape if you want to attract Miss Right, but you can’t be dumb either; if one strays too far from the middle ground between introversion and extraversion, dynamicism and staticism, one can’t mobilize himself quickly enough to do what is right in every situation; if one becomes too centered, he can’t be effective enough. Spending too much time on theory will result in inability to apply it, just like spending too much time in the trenches will cause one’s awareness level to go down, and result in ineffectiveness and confusion. It takes a pedant to succeed in the workplace and it takes a wild savage to succeed with women.